Film Review: Salt (Spoilers)
I like Phillip Noyce, but the last good film he made was over a decade ago. I like Angelina Jolie but she’s only had one good film under her belt across her entire career. ‘Salt’ doesn’t change the game for either of them. It’s an overlong, under-written affair, punctuated by lame performances from actors who should know better and plots that were old twenty years ago, which insult the audience’s intelligence from the outset.
Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent with a murky past, who works alongside fellow agents Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor (who demeans himself by even appearing in this wreck). One day out of the blue they’re confronted by a Russian defector (erm didn’t that end a decade or two ago?), who insists Salt is a sleeper agent, who is planning on killing the Russian president. Ejiofor expresses alarm, but despite being in a top security facility the defector manages to escape with ease, as does Jolie. Rather than clearing the matter up, she goes on the run, showing she’s exactly what he says she is, but claims to be hunting her kidnapped husband, who appears to have a secret significance for her (and then doesn’t). She appears to succeed in her preposterous ambition, but of course it’s all smoke and mirrors to get to the heart of the deeper conspiracy and prevent the assassination of the American president and the triggering of the Third World War. And guess who’s behind it? Well who’s the remaining A/B-list star from the credits not accounted for?
It’s predictable hocum, playing fast and loose with the audience’s understanding of geopolitics – why is the American president prepared to launch a nuclear attack on Russia when the plot is repeatedly acknowledged as a defunct Soviet one, masterminded by independent terrorists? It’s also pretty clear that the underlying sleeper agents plot, ready to destroy American society from within, is an analogy for 9/11-style radical Islamists, but the producers were no doubt too fearful of the reaction they’d get to go with their original plot. It’s ultimately a film for young teenagers and Jolie’s most die-hard fanbase, nothing more. ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ was also poorly written, but at least it had some charm, which this does not. Kurt Wimmer’s script had originally been offered to Tom Cruise (and you can see why, as well as why he turned it down), and it clearly aims for a sequel as Salt runs into an oh-so ‘Fugitive’-esque future, promising Ejiofor, who suddenly accepts her account of her final battle with Schreiber (you guessed right) with no evidence whatsoever, that she’ll take all the remaining sleeper agents out herself. She needn’t rush.
Noyce wastes the first half hour with one interminable chase after another, and it’s all really tedious and annoying. ‘The Sum of All Fears’ covered similar ground nearly a decade ago, and with much more credibility. Jolie panics over the welfare of her husband, but not so much that she doesn’t (seem to) fulfil her programming before looking for him, and then lets the plotters murder him in front of her face. All the Secret Service bodyguards in the world can’t keep the president safe in the White House bunker. The American nuclear launch protocols are remarkably easy to manipulate. The Russian president pops up quite alive days later, even though he would have been autopsied by then. Ugh ugh ugh. To be fair it improves after the initial, never-ending (and well choreographed) chase, but the plot is silly, the dialogue cringe-worthy and the film fails lamentably to stand out in a summer crammed full of (mostly) awful blockbuster attempts. I’m prepared to accept Jolie as an action lead, but she needs to get a much better script first. Noyce in turn needs to stop trading on past glories.
4/10
Film Review: Law Abiding Citizen (Spoilers)
Gerard Butler’s latest is a slickly made twist on the Silcnce of the Lambs premise – serial killer manipulates the criminal justice system for his own aims, except this serial killer was created by the judicial system. To make it work, director F Gary Gray needed it either to be a slamming indictment of American justice or an hilarious pantomime, and he just manages to toe the line between the two. Just. Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay is underdeveloped and is ultimately brought down by some shockingly bad dialogue and weak character development, but despite that and some awful acting by Jamie Foxx who practically sleepwalks through the whole thing, it manages to entertain, and in quite a big way. Much of the credit goes down to star Butler, who manages to keep his character believable, despite some frankly preposterous contrivances.
He plays family man Clyde Shelton, who is pushed over the edge after witnessing his wife and daughter’s murders and who is then betrayed by hyper-ambitious assistant D.A. Jamie Foxx. Shelton takes horrific revenge on the killers, but then turns his attention to the system which allowed the perpetrators to get away with it, picking off assistant D.A.’s, judges and even the D.A. himself (Bruce McGill). All the while Foxx and the police stand by helpless, ruthlessly manipulated by the man they let down. Except he’s killing again and again whilst still in jail – how is he managing to do that whilst incarcerated?
From an intriguing start the film gets increasingly overblown, as the scale of Shelton’s conspiracy becomes clear. But under the surface there’s actually a very strong premise – a huge number of us have lost faith in the criminal justice system, which has indeed become more about expedience for its own benefit rather than about justice. Yet whilst that message is thrown in our faces every few minutes (thanks Gray, we did actually ‘get it’ the first time), it’s never investigated with any sincerity. Take Shelton’s Batman-esque preparations and Lector-esque post-incarceration scheming out of it and you could have a dark, subversive look at a subject which motivates us all. But Butler’s pitch-perfect performance notwithstanding, it’s hampered by poor characterisation (Foxx’s character is never believable or sympathetic) and very little logic. It’s a great pantomime, with more underpinning it than most, but never really amounts to much more. Shame, but enjoy the romp!
7/10 (at least one for entertainment value alone)
